Immigration to and Emigration from Schwäbisch Hall

One of Hastings' early shopkeepers, Frederick Breyer, was included in a book recently published by the city archive of Schwäbisch Hall in Germany. The translated title of the book is "Immigration to and Emigration from Schwäbisch Hall: 1600-1914." For those of you who speak German, we now have a copy of the book in the Historical Society library. Here is an online version. Some of the following material is from our files and some is information translated directly from the book. The photos included in this post are the same ones provided to the authors of the book.

Friedrich Breyer (known as Frederick Breyer in the U.S.), was the son of a railway linesman from Uttenhofen. Friedrich was born in Heilbronn, Germany in 1869 and raised in Schwäbisch Hall. In 1884, he emigrated to the United States at the age of 15 with his 22-year old half-sister Catharina (his mother’s illegitimate daughter). His younger brother Christian Breyer (born in 1872) followed his siblings to New York in 1889, but vanished without a trace in August of 1890. 

Proprietor Fred Breyer behind the counter of his meat market, Breyer's Prospect Market Choice Meats, at 3 Spring Street, c. 1910

Frederick settled in Hastings-on-Hudson in 1899, where he married a native-born American and opened a butcher shop on Spring Street. Named "Breyer's Prospect Market," the shop was a mainstay of the village's commercial district for several decades.

Fred Breyer is in the center behind the dog, his son Fred, Jr. is seated on the barrel, and Anna Rohrbach is standing on the far right, c. 1910. This location today is the home of Giordano Beauty.

Frederick's business must have flourished, because he was able to purchase a Ford Model T truck for his establishment in the 1910s. 

Prospect Market truck, likely in the late 1910s

Prospect Market truck, overlay Google Map.

In 1920 Breyer sold his business and retired; he died in 1925. His obituary called him one of the most remarkable men of Hastings, because he continued with his trade -- without any obvious impairment -- despite ultimately losing his eyesight completely. 

Fred Breyer, Jr. on the Warburton Avenue Bridge with Demmler children, one of whom is probably Charles Demmler. Photo is c. 1905-1910.

Postcards from the Edge (of the Hudson)

The Hastings Historical Society blog is on vacation.

To tide you over, here are a couple of postcards from beautiful and historic Hastings-on-Hudson, one from the 1960s and the other from around 1909.

Wish you were here!

Title: House Tour Preview: May Yohe – Hastings’ Glamour Girl

Hastings has rarely been as close to the international high life as it was at the turn of the century when the actress May Yohe lived here. This weekend, May 22nd & May 23rd bewteen 1 & 5, the house she spent several years in will be on the Historical Society’s house tour. Her life is so incredibly like a romance novel that the wonderful 8-page article written for the Hastings Historian last year by Lilian and John Mullane was barely long enough to do it justice. This blog post, baldly cribbed from the Mullanes’ article, can only give you a hint of her extraordinary escapades. Join us for the house tour to find out more!

Mary Augustus Yohe was born on April 6, 1866 to a poor family in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her father, most likely of German ancestry, was an ironworker and a commissioned officer in the Civil War. Her mother, Lizzie Batcheller, was an expert seamstress and amateur singer of English-Narragansett Indian ancestry. Aided by German friends of her mother, May was sent abroad to an expensive boarding school in Dresden and then to a finishing school in Paris.

By the time she returned to Pennsylvania, at age 21, her father was dead and her mother had moved to Philadelphia. There her mother ran a successful dressmaker’s business. One of her wealthy customers was Mrs. John Drew, a successful actress and manager of the Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia. Mrs. Drew, impressed by May’s poise, beauty, imagination, and musical talent, gave her a letter of introduction to Mr. A.M. Palmer, the manager of the Union Square Theater in New York.


Palmer gave May a job as a chorus girl at $9 per week. Less than a year later, she had her first role: understudy to the lead actress in Natural Gas, a musical comedy. May’s career flourished. Four years later, in 1892, she was introduced to Henry Francis Pelham-Clinton Beresford Hope at a dinner party at Delmonico’s Restaurant. Lord Francis, though May did not know it, was heir to a British dukedom and the Hope Diamond. After dinner, May had planned to go to the Horse Show at Madison Square Garden, and Lord Francis boldly asked to accompany her.

Shortly afterward, they met again, in London. Lord Hope apparently arranged for May to be cast in the starring role of the play, Little Christopher, Jr. May’s “foghorn” contralto voice, performing “Honey, Ma Honey,” created quite a stir, and she soon became known as “Madcap May, the toast of London.”

May appears to have moved in with Lord Francis before they were married, but the service was finally held, in spite of the bitter opposition of his entire family, on November 27th, 1894. Between her shopping and his gambling, the couple led an expensive existence. In 1899, they set out on a luxury round-the-world tour. It was on this trip that the couple met Putnam Bradlee Strong, a Harvard graduate and son of a former mayor of New York City. When the trip ended, Strong kept up his friendship with Lord Francis -- and increased his attentions to May. When May came down with pneumonia in New York and Lord Francis refused to cut short his fishing trip to Florida, Strong kept bedside vigil instead. When she recovered, May was in love.

The couple fled first to San Francisco, and then continued on to Japan, where their house became the meeting place for the local smart set. Their life was no less extravagant than it had been in New York, only now May had to pick up the tab. When the money ran out, the couple returned reluctantly to the United States -- and to Hastings-on-Hudson.


By then May’s mother, Lizzie Batcheller, was living in a grand house on Villard Avenue. Built in 1880 in the Queen Anne style, the house has not only wrap-around verandah and an open turret, but also a large domed tower. It is unclear exactly who built the house, and when it came into Lizzie’s hands, but the money for it had certainly come from May. And to this house, Lizzie brought her daughter, her daughter’s lover, their Japanese maid Yodi, and their 100 pieces of luggage.

On the surface, May and Strong lived quite peacefully in Hastings. May returned to the New York stage to bring in an income. But Strong had resumed his gambling. In July of 1902, Strong suddenly disappeared with money he made by pawning some of May’s jewels (which were said to be worth $250,000). May followed Strong to London, and there was a reconciliation, followed in October by a marriage in Argentina. May vowed never to return to the United States, but when her mother died she did come back to sell her mother’s house to Oliver O. Gribben, a buyer in foreign rugs and tapestries for Macy’s and B. Altman’s.

This was the end of May Yohe’s connection with Hastings, though hardly the end of an eventful life that included at least two more marriages and a 1920s silent movie series that she starred in and promoted called The Hope Diamond Mystery. May made the most out of her brief association with the Hope Diamond, which she referred to as a “life-long association.” She did her best to further the completely unfounded “curse” surrounding it. Lord Hope sold the diamond in 1901, and it passed through several hands before it was donated by an American jeweler to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC in 1947.

May Yohe in 1926. Around her neck is a necklace with a large stone suspended from it, probably the replica of the Hope Diamond made for the 1921 movie series. May apparently enjoyed wearing the stone in public -- and letting people think it was was the real one.

2010 House Tour: Hastings' Characters and Character
Saturday May 22 & Sunday May 23 between 1PM & 5PM

Tickets are no longer available online, but you can still buy them at Festivities on Main Street in Hastings during business hours, and on the day of the tour during tour hours at the Historical Society tent in Zinsser Parking Lot, across the street from the train station. Tickets purchased at Festivities before Saturday are $20 for an individual, $40 for a family, and $5 for a child 8 or older. Tickets purchased the day of the tour are $25 for an individual, $50 for a family, and $5 for a child 8 or older.

And here is a grand list of the Hastings personalities featured on the tour!

Actress May Yohe

Women's rights activist Margaret Sanger

Musician Arthur Abell

Artists Rosetta and Herbert Bohnert

Empire State Building architect Richmond Shreve

Social psychologists Kenneth & Mamie Clark

Federal judge Maurice Grey

Ballet master Alexis Kosloff

Local activist and photographer A.C. Langmuir

Scientists John William Draper and his son Henry

Admiral David Glassgow Farragut

Artist Jasper F. Cropsey

Tiffany silversmith Edward C. Moore

Join us this weekend to learn more about all these fascinating characters!

House Tour Preview: Margaret Sanger’s Window

Margaret Sanger in a photograph she included in her book My Fight for Birth Control with the caption "Suburban Motherhood."

In 1998, Margaret Sanger was included in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the Century for her relentless crusade for women’s rights, and especially for birth control (a term she coined) as the tool with which women could take control of their lives. The revelations that led her to this vocation came in the tenements of the Lower East Side in 1912, two years after she left Hastings.

Margaret came to our town with her architect husband in 1904, recovering from the birth of her first child and a bout of tuberculosis, but full of hope for a life of motherhood and stability. She left in 1910, healthy again and bored with suburbia, anxious only to return to her nursing career and “the great Pageant of Living” in Manhattan.

In her 1931 book My Fight for Birth Control, she said that, looking back, she could see how every detail of her past life contributed to her final calling. Margaret had a love/hate relationship with the house that her husband designed for the family in Hastings’ Locust Hill, a development just east of North Broadway that included lots along Edgars Lane, Sheldon Place, Minturn Street. For Margaret, the house represented both a happy family life and the narrow suburban values that she would later struggle to change.

“In looking about the suburbs for a suitable location in which to build and bring up our family, we decided that we needed something more than a mere house. We wanted space. We wanted a house with a view. We wanted a garden. At Hastings-on-Hudson we came across a new development consisting of about fifty acres of hillside land overlooking the river. The land had been purchased by a group of professional people with the idea of developing a colony of homes for men and women of congenial tastes, and to insure a proper environment for their children. We were delighted with its possibilities. We bought an acre of this land with high hopes. We were going to have our own home at last! We were going to settle down for life. We were delighted with our neighbors. We planned a large family; a comfortable serene, suburban existence. …

The Hudson River looking west from the Locust Hill development, ca. 1915.

Ours was but one of several houses then in the early stages of construction. We were brought in close contact with our neighbors who were facing similar problems, the two primary ones being the building of a home and the rearing of a family. The wives spent their afternoons together conferring on these monumental problems. Out of our informal meetings there sprang a “literary” club… . It was made up of the wives of the artists, professors, scientists, doctors, and high school teachers who made up our little colony. There was an inclination, among both husbands and wives, to sink back into a complacent suburban attitude, to enjoy petty middle class comforts. For the wives, the height of adventure was a day “in town”—a shopping expedition followed by a bargain matinee. This adventure would furnish conversation for us all. At the “literary” club we read papers on Browning, George Eliot, Shakespeare, closely following the suggestions of the courses given at Columbia University. But deep in my soul I could not suppress my own dissatisfaction with the futility of such interests.

Meanwhile our house was nearing completion. It was “modern” in architecture, one of the first of its kind in this vicinity. It was even called a “show” house, and people came from far to study its simple design and the unadorned surfaces of the fireproof stucco of its walls.

Great was our anticipation of the day of its completion. For weeks we both worked on our “rose window,” which was to surmount the open staircase which led upstairs from the library. Every petal had been cut, leaded, and welded together by our own hands. After the baby had been put to bed, we worked far into the night. It seemed to me as if this rose window was the very symbol of the stability of our future. …

At last our furniture was moved in. Carpenters and painters were pushed out. Everything was completed and finished. … Weary at last but like happy children on Christmas Eve, we tumbled into bed. We were rudely awakened a few hours later by a pounding at the door and the shout of the German maid—“Madam, come! come! A fire in the big stove!” The house was on fire!

There was no telephone within half a mile of the house. My husband ran in his night clothes to sound the alarm, but it was already too late.

The Sangers' house (background, right) in Locust Hill, ca. 1910.

I carried my terror-stricken son Stuart to the top of the staircase. Flames were then leaping through one side of it. I was confronted with a terrific danger: dare I venture down those steps? I knew I must. I put the bath robe over the child’s head, and pressing close to the other side of the wall I descended cautiously but finally to safety. I crossed the street to our nearest neighbor’s. I tucked the youngster into an impromptu bed with a prayer of gratitude that we had escaped with our lives.

In a few moments the flames that were consuming the staircase had swept through our precious beautiful rose window! This I realized as I stood gazing from the neighbor’s window into the night. … I recalled our cut fingers, our bleeding hands, our irritated nerves, our fatigued eyes, all the loving hopes and ambitions which had gone into that window. …

I stood there amazed, but I was certain of a relief, of a burden lifted, a spirit set free. … Somewhere at the back of my mind I saw the absurdity of placing all of one’s hopes, all of one’s efforts … in the creation of something external that could perish irretrievably in the course of a few moments. … My scale of suburban values had been consumed in the flames, just as my precious rose window of leaded glass had been demolished. …

Fortunately, the construction of the house was fireproof, and while the inside woodwork, doors and floors were badly damaged there was the possibility of quick restoration. Within a few months the place was renewed, and life went on apparently as if the fire had never been. But to me all was different. …

A new spirit was awakening within me; a strong, insistent urge to be in the current of life’s activities. I felt as if we had drifted into a swamp and had to wait for the tide to set us free. The fire, the destruction of the rose window, had done this. I was never happy in that house again. The first opportunity we had to sell it we let it go. We moved our three children back to New York to take our part individually or collectively in the great ‘Pageant of Living.’”

Teacher Jessie Trube and her kindergarten students, ca. 1908. The boy in the center of the front row is Stuart Sanger, Margaret's eldest son. The other children are neighbors of the Sangers, and "Bennett's Shack," where Jessie taught at this time, may have been an outbuilding of the R. Grant Bennett who lived on Sheldon Place.

Margaret and William Sanger’s house will be part of our May 22 & 23 house tour. For more information and to purchase tickets, follow this link.

Broadway: A Millionaires’ Playground

The New York City Coaching Club's road coach "Pioneer" stopping to change horses in Hastings on the way to the Ardlsey Country Club, ca. 1900. (This photograph is a detail of the photograph further down the page. Click either one to examine it more closely in Flickr.)

The Historical Society has a fabulous collection of personal reminiscences from Hastings residents. Buried in the notes of those who were children at the turn of the century are several references to a coach and a barn “owned by Vanderbilt”.

Albert Shaw Jr. wrote that, as a child, he used to go down in his pony cart to Broadway near Washington Avenue “where the coach-horses were changed when Vanderbilt drove up every day from New York City to the Ardsley Country Club.”

In the 1920s, village President Alfred F. Kneen remembered that there was a barn a little to the north of Washington Avenue, across from or at the foot of Olinda Avenue, that was owned by “Vanderbilt” and where the “Tallyho” changed horses.

Memories of those days were so dim that, by the time they were written down, some people thought the coach that came through Hastings had belonged to the Astors rather than to the Vanderbilts. Everyone agreed, though, that going to see the horses changed was a tremendously thrilling event. A little research tells us why, and lets us in on a very odd corner of American history: the late 19th century sport of coaching.

Ardsley Country Club's own four-in-hand coach, the "Tally-Ho", on Broadway on its way through Hastings to the Brunswick Hotel in the city. Road coaches could seat 12 on the outside of the coach -- only the occasional lady's maid sat inside.

It was the English nobility who first turned coach driving into a sport. In the middle of the 19th century stagecoaches as public transportation were rendered obsolete by the railroads. But riding along an open country road in a brightly painted rig filled with well-dressed ladies and gentlemen still had an appeal. There were also some gentlemen who loved the challenges of coach driving—picking and training the properly balanced four-horse teams, and controlling the teams during the drive.

In 1875, two wealthy anglophiles, Colonel William Jay and Colonel DeLancey Astor Kane, helped to found New York City’s Coaching Club. Col. Kane’s own yellow road coach, imported from England and called the “Tally-ho”, made such an impression on the public that, from that moment on, all road coaches were referred to as “tallyhos.” Frank Leslie’s Magazine referred to coaching as “the sport of millionaires,” and the costs associated with it were very high—members of the Coaching Club owned both the coach itself and several changes of horses (Alfred G. Vanderbilt had 71 trotters), as well as employing grooms and trainers, and renting stables along the coaching routes where the horses would be changed—like the barn in Hastings.

The Coaching Club indulged in pleasant outings to one another’s country homes and in annual parades around Central Park—and also in what was called “public coaching.” In his 1967 article for American Heritage Magazine, Frank Kintrea defined the term: “Briefly, public coaching meant simply this: a gentleman or group of gentlemen, of sufficient wealth and ample leisure, would undertake to drive a coach on a regular schedule over a specified route, carrying passengers who had paid a fare. Anyone, theoretically, could reserve a seat on such a coach, and by paying fifty cents or a dollar extra, he could ride on the box beside the coachman, who might be DeLancey Astor Kane or Reginald Rives or even, if he were lucky, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. It may be too much to expect to fathom why Messrs. Kane, Rives, and Vanderbilt should have derived pleasure from such employment, but it is indisputable that they did.”

In theory, as Kintrea says, anyone could buy a ticket, and it only cost a few dollars. But one had to buy it at the swank New York hotel from which the coach departed. Most often, the passengers were friends and relatives of the driver or wealthy out-of-town visitors.

This is the photograph that the first detail was taken from -- here you can see the stable on the left with the sign that reads "Pioneer Coach Stable", the flock of boys running out to get a good look at the coach and its occupants (according to an 1899 article, this was one of the most amusing features of the ride for the passengers), and the cop keeping order from the sidelines. We are on Broadway, looking south, and Washington Avenue is on the right, just beyond the picket fence. In the foreground is the wheel of an automobile.

The coach that ran through Hastings was the “Pioneer” on its route from the Holland House hotel on Madison Square to the Ardsley Country Club. The run was 26 miles, and since it was thought to be best to change horses every four or five miles, Hastings was only one of five or six stops. The steep stretch from Yonkers to Hastings was thought to be the hardest on the horses, which may explain why they were changed in Hastings. At each of these stops there would be a new set of horses and possibly an extra groom to help with the change. The drive was timed for two and a half hours each way with a three hour stopover for lunch at the country club before returning to New York City. At its fastest, the coach reached speeds of almost 12 miles an hour.

The “Pioneer” did not belong to an individual, but was sponsored by the Coaching Club as a whole. Two of the most common drivers were Alfred G. Vanderbilt and Reginald W. Rives. Alfred Vanderbilt was the son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Rives became a millionaire after inheriting the estate of his father, who claimed descent from English kings. During the years 1898 to 1907, Vanderbilt, Rives, or one of the other members of the Coaching Club drove the route every day but Saturday for eight weeks beginning the Monday after Easter. But already in 1903 coaching enthusiasts could see the writing on the wall. “The witchery inseparable from handling four good horses is but little appreciated by the youth of the day, who seem to prefer the ‘honk’ of the hooting automobile to the ringing music of a ‘yard of tin’ [coach horn],” said one fan.

In 1907, having lost $6,000 on public coaching the previous year, the Coaching Club withdrew from this activity. That fall, Alfred Vanderbilt, one of public coaching’s greatest enthusiasts, drove his own coach, the “Venture,” along the old route to Ardsley, but that was to be public coaching’s last season in the United States.

Diagram of the "Pioneer" from a 1904 article in the magazine Outing, written by Reginald Rives. On the bottom he shows how the names of the places through which the coach will pass is written on the sides of the coach -- Hastings appears on the right, under Dobbs Ferry.

Volumes of Good Wishes from the Historical Society

In 1982 Algernon Gordon Smith, known to his Hastings friends as Gordon, gave the Historical Society a small scrapbook of greeting cards, two of which you see here. Gordon was a third generation Hastings-ite, and he and his wife were charter members of the society when it was founded back in 1971. He was the first editor of the Hastings Historian and the second president of the Historical Society, and his historical notes are some of the oldest in our files.

Gordon compiled his scrapbook in the first grade – that would have been in 1911. One of the cards in the book actually has a copyright date of 1909, so Gordon had probably been collecting these cards for a few years. He gave his little scrapbook as a present to “Mrs. Smith,” presumably his mother. And today we share it with you – with volumes of good wishes this holiday season!

Speed Demons of Hastings

Gus Wagner's goat cart with Ed Rohrbach at the reins, ca. 1910

By now you will have received your new Hastings Historian with the lead article by Bob Russell on the 1950s Hastings car club called the Driftin’ Shifters. The young mechanics in that club rebuilt and souped up old cars to race on the Dover Drag Strip in Wingdale, New York.

The racing spirit has a long history among Hastings residents of all ages. But while automobiles absorbed the attention of adults, kids had to take what they could get. At the turn of the century, the transportation of choice among the young racing set in Hastings was the goat cart.

In 1974 Albert Shaw Jr. described the sport of goat-cart racing in a letter to the Historical Society’s Gordon Smith. Albert Jr. was born in 1898 and his family lived on North Broadway, the stage for many hotly contested races between goat-cart owners John “Jack” Zinsser and Stanley Halle. Jack was the son of Col. Frederick G. Zinsser, owner of Zinsser Chemical Company, whose house once stood in Zinsser Park. Stanley was the nephew of the Sidenbergs, who lived on North Broadway near the Dobbs Ferry border. In their races, Albert Jr. observed a pattern – Jack always won when they were coming south and Stanley always won when they were going north. The goats, it seemed, were always willing to put on a little extra steam when heading in the direction of their own barn and feed bag.

Alfred Jr. was clearly a sporting young gentleman, following in the footsteps of his neighbors. According to an article in our files, Alfred Jr. won the local soapbox derby in 1908. This race was run on the grounds of Mackenzie School in Dobbs Ferry (now the site of Cabrini Nursing Home). Albert Jr. called his car “Isotta-Fraschini” after the make of the car that had won the popular Briarcliff Cup stock car race in Westchester that year. Our hero might not have been able to enter the race at all—he had broken both his spare wheels (they were express-wagon wheels made of wood)—but the chauffeur of another contestant lent him an extra wheel. The course ran steeply downhill along the border of Dobbs Ferry and Hastings and included at the end a hairpin turn onto Broadway that a later newspaper article described as “something of a killer-diller.” But Albert Jr. and his mechanic, a youngster from Ardsley named K.B. Conger, were clocked as the fastest and took home the prize against a field that included the fiercest competition from all the local villages.

Jack Zinsser in his pre-racing days, standing by the head of a goat cart ca. 1900; photograph lent for copying by Jack's son John A. Zinsser

Hastings’ Model Orphanage

Children from the New York Orphan Asylum in Hastings-on-Hudson with their donkey cart pulled by "Jack", the school donkey. (All the pictures in this post are from Dr. Reeder's 1909 book on the orphanage.)

One hundred years ago, in the very southwest corner of Hastings, there was a model orphanage. In 1910, the Review of Reviews described it as “one of the best examples of the cottage system for the care of orphans to be found anywhere in the world.”

The “cottage system” was invented by reformers at the end of the 19th century to counteract the evils of what they called “institutionalism.” In the early 19th century, philanthropists thought they could rescue children from the unsanitary and dangerous conditions of cities like New York by removing them from their homes and placing them in charitable institutions. But many of these were overcrowded and far from the sanitary and orderly places that the philanthropists had envisioned. They were institutions where, as Hastings R. Hart wrote in his book Preventive Treatment of Neglected Children, “children are kept in uniform, with shaved heads; where they do not have individual clothing, but have clothing distributed to them promiscuously from week to week; where lice and bedbugs prevail; where food is meager and of inferior quality; … where sleeping rooms are insanitary; where thin straw beds let the tender bodies down upon hard wooden slats; where cuffs and abuse are more freely distributed than kind words.”

The “cottage system” tried to create an environment that was more like a real home. Different ages of children lived together in fairly small groups with “cottage parents.” The ideal cottage system was also outside the city, where the air and water were clean, and where children could spend part of their day out of doors. This was what the New York Orphan Asylum had in mind when they bought their property in Hastings in 1869.

"Where We Live and Learn." The New York Orphan Asylum in 1909. On the left are the "cottages" and on the right are the administrative buildings.

But it was not until 1899 that the orphanage board decided to begin the move to Hastings, a move that was completed when the buildings were finished, in 1902. To help them carry out their plans, they hired a new superintendent, Dr. Rudolph Rex Reeder. Dr. Reeder is described in the 1913 Who’s Who in America as a “social worker,” a new profession that had developed in the 1890s. Reeder had started his career as a school principal in Illinois and completed his doctorate in education at Columbia Teacher’s College in 1900, the year he was hired by the New York Orphan Asylum.

Reeder was an enthusiastic champion of the cottage system. He wrote books and articles on the subject and spoke at conferences. He described with horror orphanages he had seen where children’s individuality and creativity were stifled. “The life of the child in most of these institutions is so dreary, soul shriveling, and void of happy interests, the daily routine of marching and eating and singing and of lining up for whatever is to be done so stupefying, as to inhibit the child’s normal development.”

Girls from the orphanage caring for a family of chickens.

In Hastings, Reeder tried to create the complete opposite of this kind of institution, and to Hart, who visited the orphanage and wrote about it in 1910, Dr. Reeder had succeeded.

“The ideal of an orphan asylum has been very nearly attained in the New York Orphanage at Hastings-on-Hudson, under the direction of Dr. R.R. Reeder. ... The institution is established on the cottage plan, with cheerful sitting rooms, well-ventilated dormitories, small dining rooms and a separate kitchen for each cottage, partly in order that the older children may assist in the care of the younger ones and partly in order to create a homelike atmosphere.

A class in a greenhouse.

Around the different cottages will be found flowerbeds, chicken coops and pets. Nearby will be found vegetable gardens, beehives, rabbit hutches, stables, etc. …

The school rooms are spacious, affording twice as much room per child as is found in the ordinary public school. This plan permits proper ventilation, exercise in the school room and comfortable seating. The schools are only an incident in the training of the child. The whole life of the child is made to articulate with his education; farming, gardening, grading, building, domestic work, play, environment of every sort, are skillfully wrought into educational material.

At the foot of the bluffs flows the Hudson River, where a bathing place is enclosed, allowing boys and girls alike to learn and practice the joyful art of swimming. ... The evils of 'institutionalism' are practically absent from this beautiful institution, and already its influence is being felt upon the orphan asylums and children's homes of the United States.”

Boys swimming in the Hudson.

Reeder wrote his own book about the Hastings orphanage in 1909, and you can read it online at Google Books, or by clicking here. Reeder was so well thought of that in 1921 he was hired to head the Oversees Child Welfare Association of America in Serbia. In 1929, following a long tradition of orphanages trading the name “asylum” for “school”, the New York Orphan Asylum changed its name to the Graham School in honor of its original founder, Isabella Graham. During the 1950s, the Manhattan branch was reorganized and renamed the Windham Society. In 1977, the Graham School and the Windham Society were consolidated into the current Graham-Windham.

Christmas in one of the cottages in 1909.

Cutting Edge Technology in Hastings: The Phonograph

If you are a frequent visitor to this blog, you probably have some sense of how many unidentified photographs we have in our collection. In order to identify a photograph, we have to find the right person with the right knowledge, but sometimes that knowledge is not of names and faces.

The photograph you see above belonged to the late Margaret Woodrow of Hillside Avenue. It has no name, no date, no marks of any kind on it. Our resident costume expert, Kenneth Loyal Smith, was attracted by the young lady’s gorgeous sleeves. That kind of sleeve, he says, became popular in 1897, and the tight collar narrows the date of the dress down to right around 1899 or 1900. Kenneth also recognized the machine at her elbow as an early phonograph, the kind that played wax cylinders.

Some online research turned up the following advertisement for a machine with a similar silhouette. It was produced by the National Phonograph Company, a company founded by Thomas Edison.


The ad belongs to Neil Lerner, a collector of early Edison phonographs who lives in North Carolina. Neil was kind enough to look at our picture, and in his opinion the phonograph in is one of Edison’s “Home” units. You can identify the model, he says, by the clips on the side of the case. These clips were used to attach the lid of this “portable” (25 lbs.) machine. Behind the woman’s elbow is a hole in the case into which a crank would have been inserted to wind up the phonograph. Only a dozen seconds of cranking, and then you could sit back and listen to an entire 2-minute cylinder -- a song, a speech, or a story.

In the 1850s, several inventors had toyed with ideas for a sound recording machine, but it was Thomas Edison who developed the first machine that could reliably record and play back sound. He demonstrated his new invention in 1877 and patented it in 1878. At the time, the phonograph was seen as an almost magical device, and was the first of Edison’s inventions to bring him international fame. Edison went on to work on other projects and came back to take up the commercial manufacture of phonographs in the late 1880s. His earliest machines were leased for business use, but in 1896 he started the National Phonograph Company specifically to manufacture phonographs to be sold to home owners.

Edison’s first domestic machine was the phonograph in Neil’s ad, the “Home” model A. It was originally priced at $40, but competition with The Columbia Phonograph Company’s “Gramophones” reduced the price of Edison’s unit to $30. As the advertisement claims, the phonograph could both play and record. Undoubtedly a bargain. In 1901 this model was restyled and the clips removed, and this allows us to date the machine that appears in our photograph to between 1896 and 1901. If the picture was taken, as the dress suggests, around 1900, the phonograph would certainly have been a new and exciting addition to the household.

The woman in the photograph remains a mystery, but we can make a guess. Margaret Woodrow was born in 1904, and this young lady looks about the right age to have been Margaret’s mother. It does seem unlikely that Margaret would have had in her possession a picture of a woman of the previous generation, taken before she herself was born, unless that woman was a relative. Margaret’s mother was Frances McConnell, daughter of Benjamin McConnell who built a house for his family at 65 Washington Avenue in about 1860. We may be looking at the interior of that very house, and the woman may be Frances or Frances’ sister, whose name was also Margaret.


This is a photograph of Margaret Woodrow taken in 1923, the year after she graduated from Hastings High School. Is there a resemblance?

Of course, we can’t say for sure. The photograph at the top of the blog may show an older friend or mentor of Margaret’s who didn’t even live in Hastings. But, even if that is the case, photographs of domestic machines and household appliances are rare, and it is exciting to discover in our collection an image of one of the earliest phonographs.

Dateline: HASTINGS, September 7, 1900

as reported in the Hastings column of the Dobbs Ferry Register

Warburton Avenue, looking north from the bridge. (Click on any photograph for more information.)

Counselor Wm. H. Blain of Tower Ridge is spending his vacation in town.

Thomas F. Martin [village tax collector] has been enjoying a well-earned vacation during the past week.

Dr. Albert Shaw of Broadway, Editor of the Review of Reviews, is spending his vacation in the Adirondacks.

Mr. J. Perry Worden, the well known literary man and lecturer, has returned from Germany for a brief visit to his home here.


The Fraser Free School opened on Tuesday with the largest attendance in its history. The Board of Education was unable to accommodate all who applied for admission, thus emphasizing the necessity of having a new school, the need of which has been apparent for several years.

A well contested game of baseball between the Hastings Athletic Club and the Uniontown Fire Company’s team on Labor Day resulted in a decisive victory for the fire laddies, the score standing 12 to 6 in their favor. Charles Gerkin pitched for the Firemen and John [Falbush?] Jr. for the Athletics.

The winning team: Charles Gerkin is the in the back row on the far right.

The firemen were called out at eight o’clock on Wednesday evening to extinguish a fire which started in the laundry of Mr. Robert Behr’s residence on Broadway. The prompt and efficient work of our fire fighters prevented the flames from spreading beyond the apartment where they originated, and as a consequence the damage was slight.

The ladies’ fair for the benefit of St. Matthew’s Church opened in the parish hall on Monday evening. The tables are in charge of the following ladies: Mrs. Walter A. Burke (St. Matthew’s table), Miss Marie H. Murphy (Sacred Heart table), Miss Josie Monk (Young Men’s Catholic Association table), and Miss Eliza Booth (refreshment table).

Gus Wagner (second from left), owner of the town's bicycle shop, outside Goodwin's cigar store with some of his stock and customers.

There are several voting contests in progress, among them being a contest for a bicycle, to be awarded to the most popular boy or girl; a contest for a silver trumpet between Protection Hose Company No. 1 and Union Hose Company No. 2; and a contest for a child’s crib to be given to the most popular baby.

The regular monthly meeting of the Village Board was held at the Corporation Rooms, on Tuesday evening. There were present: President [James E.] Hogan, Trustees [Francis] Curry, [Frederick G.] Zinsser, [William] Steckert, and [Monahan?], and Village Counsel [Melvin G.] Palliser. The minutes of the regular meeting of August 24th were read and approved. The Committee on Streets reported that all streets were in good condition. The Committee on Lights reported that arc lights had been placed at either end of the bridge. The Village Counsel reported that the new contract with the Hudson River Gas and Electric Company had not yet been executed. Mr. Curry called up the matter of the extension of Nepperhan Avenue, and on motion the Village Counsel was directed to acquire title to the property required for the extension, in accordance with the map prepared by E. Wulff, Civil Engineer. …

Cutting Edge Technology in Hastings: The Automobile

The Society's earliest photograph of a car, probably taken before 1907 (click on any photograph for more information)

On Memorial Day of 1896, Hastings residents were thrilled by an event that had, until then, only been witnessed by residents of Paris, London, and Chicago – a horseless carriage race! The race began at about 2PM at King’s Bridge and passed along Broadway through Yonkers, Hastings, and Dobbs Ferry, with the finishing line in front of the veranda of the Ardsley Country Club. The judges waiting on the veranda included John Jacob Astor, Chauncey Depew (President of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad) and Frank Thomson (Vice President of the Pennsylvania Railroad). Here is how this momentous occasion was described in a 1929 article from the Hastings News:

“John Brisbane Walker, then editor of the Cosmopolitan, living at Irvington on an estate near what is now the Chevrolet factory and in a house built by Stanford White, offered ... $1,000 to anyone who could ride from New York City to Irvington in one of the new-fangled “horseless carriages.” No time limit was stipulated. All the contestants had to do was to get to Irvington. People from miles around … gathered in anticipation of the momentous ride.

All Hastings jammed its way along the road. From New York seven [according to the New York Times, there were only six] determined riders started out. Riding before them on horse back were couriers who were to clear the way and to see that no on was hurt by the speeding monsters. Hours passed. People on the Handy porch [at Broadway and Warburton] craned their necks. There was a tremendous noise, as if a dozen threshing machines were in action. Around the bend two puffing, steaming horseless carriages were coming at a terrific rate of 8 miles an hour. Cheers broke out.

Eventually one of the two got to Irvington. The Columbus got Mr. Walker’s $1,000.”

The winner of the race was Frank Duryea. He was driving one of his company’s Duryea Motor Wagons, which were among the first “motor-vehicles” powered by gasoline. Frank covered the 13 miles from King’s Bridge to Ardsley in one hour, five minutes, and forty-two and two-fifths seconds. A year earlier, Frank had won the Chicago Times Herald race with an even better speed -- 7.5 miles an hour.

In 1895 the horseless carriage was called “a pack of French nonsense,” which could never replace a horse. In 1910 a series of photographs were taken of the lively Hastings - Dobbs Ferry Auto Club, documenting the first stirrings of Hastings’ addiction to the newfangled machine.

The Hastings - Dobbs Ferry Auto Club on Broadway near the Hastings - Dobbs Ferry boundary in 1910. Many Hastings residents were members, including Irving Smith, Frederick Charles Sr., Thomas F. Reynolds, Walter Keys, Henry Collins Brown, and the actor Walker Whiteside. These were some of the wealthier members of our community, and it’s not surprising to find them all in the auto club, since they were the ones who could afford to purchase automobiles.

The Early Years of the Hastings Literature Club

By Julia House

Editor’s Note: This year the Hastings Literature Club, the oldest cultural organization in Hastings, celebrates its 100th anniversary. Its first president was Julia House, author of last week’s reminiscence on the village in the first decade of the 20th century. Julia and John House lived in the Tower Ridge area from 1903 until 1909, when they built themselves a new house on Sheldon Place. Julia describes it as “up in the fields where we used to take the children to pick daisies and look at the cows.” Even before the move, Julia had become involved with a group that later became the Literature Club. What follows is an edited version of an informal history of that organization that Julia wrote in 1942.


I think I may claim for that early group that they did work their brains just a little harder than we do to-day. We made our programs with the idea of not merely reading a book and then sharing the best of it with the Club; we were supposed to take a literary subject, read as many books as we could get hold of and could find time to read on that subject – then boil down the knowledge thus gained, and to the best of our ability, in a strictly limited time, present it to the Club. In short, we wrote papers and we read our papers, and I really wish that some of the best of those papers could have been preserved along with the records, just to show what we could do in those days. …

The Club began as a very small group, probably in 1905 or ’06 – the exact date seems to have become lost in the mists of antiquity – when a few women in Yonkers began meeting to read and discuss books. Sarah Hine [wife of photographer Lewis W. Hine] and Josephine Murlin [wife of John R. Murlin] were the prime movers in this modest enterprise. There were others whose names I have forgotten as they dropped out when the group became centered in Hastings.

This came through the Murlins moving to Hastings. Soon after they came here, Mrs. Murlin invited some of her new friends, who were later to be her neighbors on Locust Hill, to join the group. That was when Mrs. Bennett, Mrs. [Ina] Griswold, Mrs. [Margaret] Sanger, Mrs. Matthew, and I came in, making it a considerably larger circle. Mrs. Hine and Mrs. Middleton still came up from Yonkers faithfully and the rest of us frequently jogged down there in the trolley for meetings with them.

Ina Griswold, one of the founding members of the Literature Club, on the far left, attends a meeting of the club around 1960 in the home of Phyllis Andrews. Her daughter Ruth sits with her back to the camera, and across from her are Harriet Haug (right), and possibly Miriam Pomeroy (next to Ina).

Naturally with so few members, each one entertained often, but the entertaining was very simple. Tea was the only beverage ever served, and with it we might have crackers or maybe some peppermints. So it wasn’t much of a burden on the hostess and left our minds pretty free for Literature. The custom of bringing our sewing or knitting to the meeting dates from those early days, when we were only too glad to sit quietly and darn the children’s socks or let down the hems of their dresses, away from the little dears for a time, and to the soothing accompaniment of good literature. I am glad that, as we have grown bigger, we have still kept to those informal ways and are still more like a gathering of real country neighbors than a proper women’s club. …

In 1909 we actually became a Club, for then we adopted a constitution and elected officers – a President, Secretary, and a Chairman of the Program Committee. … For the first few years, our programs were mostly based on syllabi of Literature courses given at Columbia, but after a while we got away from those, and our Program Committees depended on the preparatory reading they did themselves as a basis for the year’s work. …

The Literature Club's certificate from the New York State Education Department registering it as a "study club" in 1910.

After doing English literature with some degree of thoroughness, we turned to the literature of other lands – France, Germany, Russia, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, getting a great deal of pleasure and at least some new knowledge. After we felt we had had enough of foreign culture for the time being, we turned to our American writers and found that a great deal was to be learned about them, more than we had studied in school. We found fresh viewpoints and new appreciation of familiar writers. …

I was under the impression that during the First World War we suspended our meetings for at least one winter for I seem to remember nothing of that year of 1917 but making surgical dressings in Mrs. Fink’s dining room. But it seems we did keep up our regular meetings listening to the programs while doing this work and always meeting at the same place where the materials were kept. That was a sober time, but I am sure we were drawn closer together, not only our group but the whole community, by the strains of the times. …

And it is good that we can still go on together for a while, old friends and newer ones. Our Club has enlarged our vision and brought us into contact with great minds, but most of all it has been a source of both inspiration and relaxation because of the friendly feeling, the almost family feeling of it, the welcome sympathy in times of trouble, the never failing interest of each one in all the rest. May there always be a Woman’s Literature Club of Hastings-on-Hudson.

A portrait of Mrs. Julia House in 1918.

The Historical Society has a large collection of material from the Literature Club, including an (almost) complete set of programs. The records have been organized for us by members Barbara Thompson and Helen Barolini, and Susan Korsten and Diana Jaeger have created the display on the club that is currently on view at the Historical Society. Christine Lehner, another member, is gathering material for an article about the club and its history. Watch the Hastings Literature Club blog for more information.

Our Village in 1909

by Julia House

Editor’s Note: As much fun as it is to look at hundred-year-old photographs of Hastings, it’s even more exciting to have someone tell us what Hastings was really like in 1909. This reminiscence is an edited version of “A Long Look Backward,” an article written by Julia House around 1955, which we recently uncovered in a box of papers from the Literature Club. Julia moved to Hastings as a newlywed in 1903, and here’s what she has to say about her early years in Hastings.

Warburton Avenue in 1909

Hastings was a sleepy village in those days. None of the streets were paved, and the occasional motor-car was something to stare at. In summer the watering-cart jogged up the main streets, wetting down the dust. The Brandt mansion, now occupied by the Veterans, was almost concealed by masses of shrubbery.…

I had never known a place like Hastings, and it took me some time to feel a part of it. It was so different from my New England, and so I called it very Dutch….

Mr. Joe Murphy, proprietor of the “Bridge Grocery” sent us a polite letter, asking us to deal with him. This was flattering, and we at once became customers. Each morning Mr. Murphy or his assistant would call at the back door to take orders, and deliver in the afternoon. It was not long, however, before we were notified that since so many people now had telephones, the orders would in future be given by that means. We had not contemplated anything so startling, but now it seemed we really needed a ‘phone, so it was duly installed in our little hall. It was not handsome, but it did look important, sitting up there on the wall, with its crank at the side which, briskly turned, would summon the operator.…

Fred Breyer in his market ca. 1909

My marketing, for meat, was mostly at Breyer’s, on Spring Street near Maple Avenue. In winter, the market was as cold inside as out-doors, and Mr. and Mrs. Breyer, both large, were swathed in so many garments they were positively gigantic. In summer, they must have had ice for the meat, and returned to normal size.…

There was little social life, as far as I could see. The men got to know each other, going to the city on the train, and sometimes would bring their wives together, but card-playing seemed to be the only amusement….

The Tower Ridge Yacht Club in 1905

Our great boon was the Yacht Club, so near us, and easily reached (I thought then) by a long flight of wooden steps going down into the ravine and a bridge over the railroad tracks. My husband enjoyed the sailing races on Saturday afternoons and could always have a job as able-bodied seaman on somebody’s boat, until he had one of his own, shared with a friend. But the sailing was not very good. Thunder-storms were always coming up, or else the boats would be becalmed, and sometimes they wouldn’t get in until midnight.

The Club was a paradise for the boys of the neighborhood, as it was later for our own sons. There they learned to swim – the river was cleaner then – and played among the boats under the watchful eye of wiry little Ed Cook, “Cap” to them, as to their fathers. Cap had strong language at his command, but usually the boys obeyed him without his resorting to it….

You would hardly believe what a nice little beach there was, down by the riverside, before the tracks were moved out to their present location. I used to take my young son down there to play contentedly with shovel and pail, and watch the boats on one side and the “choo-choos” on the other. We early acquired a small rowboat, and used to venture across the river on calm days, but it was a venture, since we never could be sure it would stay clam. It usually didn’t, and the return trip was sometimes too exciting to be pleasant. But we enjoyed exploring the other side, which seemed a different world, quaint and quiet, with its old stone cottages and winding, uphill roads. Hastings seemed almost urban when we got back to it.

Gus Wagner in his sleigh in 1905

Our first two winters were extremely cold, with snow on the ground all winter. People drove across the river in sleighs, and we used to drag our baby across, tucked up in a box on a sled. Those two winters were something to remember, with the wind roaring down from the North Pole, and blowing right into our defenseless little house. It was a wonder we and it were not blown away entirely. It was impossible to keep warm, with the old hot-air furnace, a fireplace in the dining-room, in which we burned cannel coal, and the kitchen stove, which perhaps did the best job. Our relatives in the city did have something on us, then. But in spite of the rough winter, we still loved our home by the river….

Julia House’ reminiscences continue next week with the early history of the Literature Club. Julia was the first president of this club, which was founded in 1909.

The New Historian Mails Today!

Today the hardy Historical Society volunteers gather once more to prepare the Hastings Historian for the post. They have even more work than usual because this Historian is going to all the households in the village – more than 4,000 of them!

No one who has followed the Society’s doings over the past six months will be surprised to learn that the lead article in this issue is on the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration. With Roger Panetta’s lecture in January and the opening of our own Hudson-Fulton exhibition here at the cottage in April, we have been immersed in this festival that galvanized the entire village one hundred years ago.

And you know how it is when you have something on the brain – you find it everywhere. A couple of weeks ago, after the Historian had gone to press, we were looking through Arthur C. Langmuir’s scrapbooks on Hastings history. They have never been thoroughly indexed, and on page 51 of volume II, we found this wonderful photograph that we didn’t even know we had. The caption says that it is a photograph of the Protection Engine Company firehouse decorated for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration.

Those who recognize Langmuir’s name may wonder why his scrapbook contains such an early photograph. Langmuir moved to Hastings in 1919 and his incredible collection of 1000+ photographs of the village all date to the 1920s and 30s. But Langmuir was a history nut. He begged and borrowed photographs of early Hastings from other local photographers, like Harriet Draper, Fred Berbert, and Joseph A. Devine. The photograph you see above has a handwritten note next to it reading “copied from a negative loaned by George T. Sackett.” Sackett was a local druggist and amateur photographer who came to Hastings in the 19th century. Some of our earliest photographs of the village, and the best photographs we have of the Hudson-Fulton celebration, were taken by George Sackett.


On page 55 of the same scrapbook, there are two more of Sackett’s fire company photographs from the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. The first is a copy of a photograph we have in our Sackett collection, and it is up in our exhibition. It shows the Protection Engine firetruck in front of the same firehouse, maybe even on the same day. The caption with the photograph adds the information that the horse used was borrowed from the Chrystie family who owned the large estate at Five Corners where the A&P grocery store is today.


The other photograph on the page shows a fire hose on wheels decorated with bunting and flags. The photograph does not have a caption, but this same equipment appears in the background of another photograph showing the National Conduit & Cable Company’s fire brigade. They marched along with the Protection Engine Company and the Uniontown Hose Company in Hastings’ own Hudson-Fulton parade on October 5th, 1909. (You will read much more about this parade and all the other Hudson-Fulton festivities in the Historian.) The place where the photograph was taken, however, is a mystery. Does anyone recognize the location?

We hope you enjoy this Historian, and that it makes you as excited about the Hudson-Celebration as we are. If it does, make some time to visit the Historical Society and see our exhibition!